Combine this with thoughtful and thorough apparatus, and Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues is the most flexible and comprehensive collection ever created for undergraduate courses.

    This book is about setting the limits of the natural and the limits of the known, wonders and wonder, from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment. A history of wonders as objects of natural inquiry is simultaneously an intellectual history of the orders of nature. A history of wonder as a passion of natural inquiry is simultaneously a history of the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists. Pursued in tandem, these interwoven histories show how the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility, were obverse and reverse of the same coin rather than opposed to one another.--From the IntroductionWonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions--these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature's best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds.

    While tracing ideas from ancient Babylon to sixteenth-century Europe, the book places its greatest emphasis on the Greek period, when astronomers developed the geometric and philosophical ideas that have determined the subsequent character of Western astronomy. The author approaches this history through the concrete details of ancient astronomical practice. Carefully organized and generously illustrated, the book can teach readers how to do real astronomy using the methods of ancient astronomers. For example, readers will learn to predict the next retrograde motion of Jupiter using either the arithmetical methods of the Babylonians or the geometric methods of Ptolemy. They will learn how to use an astrolabe and how to design sundials using Greek and Roman techniques. The book also contains supplementary exercises and patterns for making some working astronomical instruments, including an astrolabe and an equatorium. More than a presentation of astronomical methods, the book provides a critical look at the evidence used to reconstruct ancient astronomy. It includes extensive excerpts from ancient texts, meticulous documentation, and lively discussions of the role of astronomy in the various cultures. Accessible to a wide audience, this book will appeal to anyone interested in how our understanding of our place in the universe has changed and developed, from ancient times through the Renaissance.

    In those twelve months, Einstein shattered many cherished scientific beliefs with five extraordinary papers that would establish him as the world's leading physicist. This book brings those papers together in an accessible format. The best-known papers are the two that founded special relativity: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies and Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content? In the former, Einstein showed that absolute time had to be replaced by a new absolute: the speed of light. In the second, he asserted the equivalence of mass and energy, which would lead to the famous formula E = mc2.The book also includes On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light, in which Einstein challenged the wave theory of light, suggesting that light could also be regarded as a collection of particles. This helped to open the door to a whole new world--that of quantum physics. For ideas in this paper, he won the Nobel Prize in 1921.The fourth paper also led to a Nobel Prize, although for another scientist, Jean Perrin. On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat concerns the Brownian motion of such particles. With profound insight, Einstein blended ideas from kinetic theory and classical hydrodynamics to derive an equation for the mean free path of such particles as a function of the time, which Perrin confirmed experimentally. The fifth paper, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions, was Einstein's doctoral dissertation, and remains among his most cited articles. It shows how to calculate Avogadro's number and the size of molecules.These papers, presented in a modern English translation, are essential reading for any physicist, mathematician, or astrophysicist. Far more than just a collection of scientific articles, this book presents work that is among the high points of human achievement and marks a watershed in the history of science. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the miraculous year, this new paperback edition includes an introduction by John Stachel, which focuses on the personal aspects of Einstein's youth that facilitated and led up to the miraculous year.

    Dimitri Gutas draws upon the preceding historical and philological scholarship in Greco-Arabic studies and the study of medieval translations of secular Greek works into Arabic and analyses the social and historical reasons for this phenomenon.Dimitri Gutas provides a stimulating, erudite and well-documented survey of this key movement in the transmission of ancient Greek culture to the Middle Ages.

    By building a network of computers, he believed the government could avoid buying so many new ones for academic research. From these modest Cold War beginnings a global networking industry has flourished, creating virtual communities, online shopping, the ubiquitous e-mail, and immense fortunes. Stephen Segaller's timely book draws on interviews with more than seventy of the pioneers who have used their technological genius and business skills to make incompatible systems work together, to make networking user-friendly, and to create a new global communications medium that rivals the telephone system or television in its scope and reach.Nerds 2.0.1 tells the dramatic, often comical story of how the world's computers have come to be wired together over the last thirty years. This paperback reprint contains new material to update the picture of this still-evolving saga.

    Then in 1980, a radical theory was proposed: 65 million years ago, an asteroid or comet as big as Mt. Everest, traveling at 100,000 miles per hour, struck the earth, throwing up a dust cloud that darkened the sky, caused the temperature to plummet, and killed the dinosaurs and 70 percent of all other species. Night Comes to the Cretaceous is the first comprehensive and objective account of how this fantastic theory changed the course of science. The author, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History tells the dramatic story of how Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter stumbled onto evidence suggesting that a single random event caused the extinction of the dinosaurs - a claim many scientists found unbelievable. After years of bitter debate and intense research, an astonishing discovery was made - an immense impact crater buried deep in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico that was identified as Ground Zero. The unbelievable appeared to be true.

    She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief—whether figured as credit, credibility, or credulity—remained essential to the production of knowledge.Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.

    His elusive and often misquoted discourse has resulted, over the years, in slurs against his name and reputation as a scientist. Let him speak then, so that he can bring to everyone's attention his message of reason, of intellectual honesty, and of free thinking. A message that, more than ever, is of great relevance in the rampant irrationality of the new millennium.The exposition begins with a blunt 'self-portrait'. A 'forgery' of course, based mainly on extracts from Galileo's writings and private letters; something he would never have dared, nor been allowed, to write for the public. The selection of writings offered includes many of the subjects that were closest to Galileo's heart and mind with lively commentary from both the literary, scientific, and historical viewpoints. For those who want to know the mathematics behind Galileo's theories, each chapter closes with a separate self contained summary.Thus Spoke Galileo will allow the reader to appreciate the work and the writing-style of a great scientist and author who had a tremendous influence on the modern world.

    Philosophical considerations have played an essential and ineliminable role in the actual practice of science. The book begins with some necessary introduction to the history of ancient and early modern science, but emphasizes the two great watersheds of twentieth-century physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. At times the term construction may seem more appropriate than discovery for the way theories have developed and, especially in later chapters, the discussion focuses on the influence of historical, philosophical and even social factors on the form and content of scientific theories.

    The Chinese culture is the only culture in the world that has developed systematic logical definitions and reflections on its own and on the basis of a non-Indo-European language. Christoph Harbsmeier discusses the basic features of the classical Chinese language that made it a suitable medium for science in ancient China, discussing in detail a wide range of abstract concepts that are crucial for the development of scientific discourse. There is special emphasis on the conceptual history of logical terminology in ancient China, and on traditional Chinese views on their own language. Finally the book provides an overview of the development of logical reflection in ancient China, first in terms of the forms of arguments that were deployed in ancient Chinese texts, and then in terms of ancient Chinese theoretical concerns with logical matters.

    He shows how both the contents of the Bible, and more particularly the way it was interpreted, had a profound influence on conceptions of nature from the third century to the seventeenth. The rise of modern science is linked to the Protestant approach to texts, an approach that spelled an end to the symbolic world of the Middle Ages, and established the conditions for the scientific investigation and technological exploitation of nature.

    The terms mechanics and mechanical world view were being used as general descriptions of nineteenth-century physicists' assumptions and interpretations of nature. However, there were no studies of the particulars of these assumptions or the range and content of these interpretations. Rene Dugas' work on classical mechanics focused on France. The search for the particulars of these forms of "mechanics" led me to explore precisely what mechanics meant to physicists of a century and more ago. However, none of Lagrange's, Hamilton's, or Jacobi's "mechanics," while ele- gant, fits easily within the history of physics. Lagrange reduced mechanics to an exercise in analysis; Hamilton and Jacobi used mechanics to explore solutions to partial differential equations. They were mathematicians doing mathematics. As I went deeper into the matter it became obvious that, in the nineteenth century, there were two kinds of mechanics, each containing a variety of forms, one physical, the other mathematical. There were a group of men using mechanics to understand nature and another group using the equations of mechanics to explore the calcu- lus. However, when tracing these two traditions back into the eighteenth century, physics disappeared altogether.

    Newly translated by Richard Evans Schultes, the Journals offer valuable information for modern-day readers. Descriptions of about 2000 plants, fully indexed in the book, make the Journals an extensive botanical resource, while observations of landscape, weather, and native cultures create a unique historical picture for students of geography, geology, anthropology, and colonial history. As a historical find, the Journals are a remarkable document. Recounting the first of a series of Spanish expeditions to the New World, the story they tell is one of great sacrifice and hardship in the name of science. Bad weather, fatigue, and all the dangers of travel in the wilds were endured, as well as disasters including the death of artist Jose Brunete and the loss of a manuscript to fire. In the scientific realm, Ruiz's studies may be considered ground-laying work in the discipline of ethnobotany. By relating the uses of plants by natives, such as the extraction of quinine for the treatment of malaria, to his description of the plant in its native environment, Ruiz employed methods central to modern science.

    He is numbered alongside Newton, Maxwell and Einstein as one of the greatest physicists of all time. Together the lectures in this volume, originally presented on the occasion of the dedication ceremony for a plaque honoring Dirac in Westminster Abbey, give a unique insight into the relationship between Dirac's character and his scientific achievements. The text begins with the dedication address given by Stephen Hawking at the ceremony. Then Abraham Pais describes Dirac as a person and his approach to his work. Maurice Jacob explains how Dirac was led to introduce the concept of antimatter, and its central role in modern particle physics and cosmology. This is followed by David Olive's account of the origin and enduring influence of Dirac's work on magnetic monopoles. Finally, Sir Michael Atiyah explains the deep and widespread significance of the Dirac equation in mathematics.

    Areas covered include: phrenology and mesmerism; theories of dreams, memory, and the unconscious; female and masculine sexuality; insanity and nervous disorders; and theories of degeneration. Texts have been chosen from a wide variety of scientific, medical, and cultural sources to illustrate the social range of these debates. Embodied Selves will be of interest to both specialist and non-specialist audiences in the areas of cultural, literary, historical, and gender studies.

    Alison Winter's fascinating cultural history traces the history of mesmerism in Victorian society. Mesmerized is both a social history of the age and a lively exploration of the contested territory between science and pseudo-science. "Dazzling. . . . This splendid book . . . gives us a new form of historical understanding and a model for open and imaginative reading."—James R. Kinkaid, Boston Globe"A landmark in the history of science scholarship."—John Sutherland, The Independent"It is difficult to imagine the documentary side of the story being better done than by Winter's well-researched and generously illustrated study. . . . She is a lively and keen observer; and her book is a pleasure to read purely for its range of material and wealth of detail. . . . Fruitful and suggestive."—Daniel Karlin, Times Literary Supplement"An ambitious, sweeping and fascinating historical study. . . . Beautifully written, thoroughly researched, and well-illustrated."—Bernard Lightman, Washington Times

    A particular feature of the volume is the treatment of Galileo's relationship with the Church. It will be of particular interest to philosophers, historians of science, cultural historians and those in religious studies. New readers and nonspecialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Galileo available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Galileo.

    Augustine offered 1500 years ago--and according to Pierre Manent the modern West has decisively and irreversibly chosen the latter. In this subtle and wide-ranging book on the Western intellectual and political condition, Manent argues that the West has rejected the laws of God and of nature in a quest for human autonomy. But in declaring ourselves free and autonomous, he contends, we have, paradoxically, lost a sense of what it means to be human.In the first part of the book, Manent explores the development of the social sciences since the seventeenth century, portraying their growth as a sign of increasing human self-consciousness. But as social scientists have sought to free us from the intellectual confines of the ancient world, he writes, they have embraced modes of analysis--economic, sociological, and historical--that treat only narrow aspects of the human condition and portray individuals as helpless victims of impersonal forces. As a result, we have lost all sense of human agency and of the unified human subject at the center of intellectual study. Politics and culture have come to be seen as mere foam on the tides of historical and social necessity.In the second half of the book, titled Self-Affirmation, Manent examines how the West, having discovered freedom, then discovered arbitrary will and its dangers. With no shared touchstones or conceptions of virtue, for example, we have found it increasingly hard to communicate with each other. This is a striking contrast to the past, he writes, when even traditions as different as the Classical and the Christian held many of these conceptions in common.The result of these discoveries, according to Manent, is the disturbing rootlessness that characterizes our time. By gaining autonomy from external authority, we have lost a sense of what we are. In giving birth to ourselves, we have abandoned that which alone can nurture and sustain us. With penetrating insight and remarkable erudition, Manent offers a profound analysis of the confusions and contradictions at the heart of the modern condition.